119431-want-wildstar-to-have-population-growth-click-here
Content ---- ---- ---- This. I will gladly shill for this game if they plan to do some promotions like this. But still, Carbine needs to fix most, if not all of the problems that plague the game before they can consider all of that, and I think that's what they're waiting on. | |} ---- ---- ---- From the way I look at it (could be and probably am wrong) NCshoft as mentioned by Naix, is wanting WS to be as bug free and stable as it possibly can be. Advertising, regardless of format, costs money. It can even run up to the millions if done on a wide scale. NCsoft arent going to want to shell out this kind of money until they know its ready. They did say (if you believe it) that they fully back Carbine and Wildstar. This tells me that they are saying "looks, wwe think this game can be great, we're gonna give you time to short it out before we invest more. If you mess it up though we'll pull the plug" Thats my views anyways. | |} ---- ---- What does it say about a game, if the publisher and devs don't see the game as good enough to advertise, 6 months AFTER launch? Waiting until drop X for a perfect game is not a good idea. Player loss just snowballs, as we have already seen first hand. | |} ---- ---- ---- You showed support subconsciously, so....kinda? I actively tell my friends and followers about Wildstar, but can only do so much on my end with bringing people back to try changes they may like, bringing new bodies to the game, and doing what I can to provide a fun space for people to get into content they were afraid to try(this is a thing) which helps retention. I've mentioned it a few times before, but I get questions about wildstar sometimes after ranging from a silly question like "Are Chua hamsters?" to more serious ones such as "What kind of end-game content is there?" and I do my best to answer them honestly and as unbiased as I can which I think is all anyone outside of Carbine's marketing team can really do. To me word of mouth is great way to advertise, but it can sometimes backfire a bit. The jokey "Hardcore" stuff as example at first seemed to be a fun way to advertise and poke at, but I don't think many caught it and saw it as a joke which is often evident when I talk to some people about Wildstar(that havent played it). I'd like to think they will advertise more when the game is a bit more "stable" as others have said before me, but we'll see. I feel that on the players part just being honest about your experiences should be good enough. Give your friends both positives and negatives as both can help temper their expectations AND give them a better idea of what they're getting into when/if they try the game. Also being willing to be patient and helpful goes a long way with your friends and new players you've never met leaves a very lasting impression as well in a very positive way. | |} ---- ---- No it doesn't. My guild raids 9 hours a week total and has 6/6 GA. We just cleared GA in its entirety this week in 5 hours. Also, there is a pug GA raid on Entity that I see running every week. I know they've gotten up to at least Kuralak but I don't know if that's all. | |} ---- I don't make recommendations for pug raiding in any game. :P If it works, great for those involved. It's not something I would send my friends into and it's certainly not reliable. As to raiding 9 hours a week, I assume you're running on a 3 day schedule, correct? So you're spending 9 hours in GA itself... how many hours do you spend researching and getting repair/rune gold, or any other raid-related activity? Pretty sure you're sinking at least 10 hours into raids. | |} ---- Guild bank provides consumables. In fact the guild bank has more money than we need for consumables so we're cashing out to guildies and might turn on guild repairs at some point. Researching doesn't take very long, and it's no different from researching a dungeon, or researching farm spots, or researching drop tables for potential upgrades, or researching the market for money making opportunities, or researching what décor items are available and planning a house. The point is, raiding is not the exclusive domain of research and planning in an MMO. I don't take any longer to rune than anyone else because they're not reserved for raiding either. Outside of those 9 hours I usually just do other stuff to cap my EG for the week, which in addition to gold from bosses, is more than enough money to more than cover any repair/incidental costs. TL;DR version is that I don't have to go out of my way to do anything extra above and beyond what non-raiders are doing. I guess by casual raiding you meant LFR raiding (which I would be against if it meant creating a noob difficulty level for each raid), because it's perfectly possible to raid less than 9 hours a week with the right guild. | |} ---- ---- I never made the argument that research was exclusive to raids so I'm not sure why you're making the point as though it undermines my position. It's irrelevant to the dialogue between us. If you're spending even 5-10 minutes most days of the week (including showing up 10 minutes early to raids, which is common), that will add up to about an hour spent on raiding, outside of actual raid gameplay. However, thank you for allowing me a moment to clarify: the issue isn't really the difference between 9 and 10 hours, it's that you're on a schedule for 3 days a week. That's half the week, roughly, and it's something that most people I know have no interest in at this point in their "MMO careers". In most MMOs I've played 3-4+ days is considered hardcore semi-hardcore, while 1-2 days is considered casual. I've seen one guild that raids two days a week in Wildstar and their progression over time is not good. So no, by casual raiding I did not mean lower difficulty, I meant accessibility. I meant not having to give half of my days to a raid schedule. I meant raiding that my 30+ year old friends will be able and willing to do, since this is a discussion about spreading the word. | |} ---- Alright, given your caveats as follows: - 1-2 days raiding is a casual schedule - a raid schedule is created by the guild/group - existing guilds that use a 1-2 days schedule have poor progression My question is this then: If nothing is stopping guilds from having a shorter raid schedule already, but that schedule results in slower progress, then how do you expect to make raiding more accessible without nerfing raids, and still make acceptable progress? | |} ---- I need to make two corrections here, the first being that an existing guild, not guilds, is using a 2 day schedule, not 1, and has poor progression (IMO). This clarification is important because your statement makes it seem like there's actually a casual raiding community here involving more than one guild. As far as I've seen having spent time in the guild recruitment forum and asking around, there is no such community, just the one guild. I'm definitely open to correction myself on this last point though. Second correction I'd like to make concerns your line of argument. Whereas I posted here explaining why I would not recommend this game to friends, and did not post here stating simply that I dislike things and they should be improved, there is currently no reason for me to have expectations or suggestions to Carbine or raiding guilds. That's not the point. The point is, regardless of why, regardless of possible solutions or the lackthereof, the raiding scene in this game is not currently open to casual participation on a meaningful level (by meaningful here I mean in a gameplay/progression context, because people can still enjoy socializing and such, and that has meaning as well). I realize that creating a list of problems I perceive in the game is going to make me a bit of a target for debate, but let's not forget the context of my posting here. ;) | |} ---- ---- ---- We do have that. It's called . I keep an eye there looking for "jobs" on Seeger. | |} ---- There are a few casual raiding guilds EU and NA side, but the ones I know of do not really advertise much and get members via friends or just word of mouth as opposed to forums and the usual Zone chat recruitment. It sounds like you have an idea of what you want and people who might be on the same mindset as well. Have you attempted to gather said friends and approach the content in the casual manner that you feel is more to your liking? | |} ---- I think one of the issues is that Wildstar NEEDS more advertising than most of those. Think about it, you listed MMORPGs based these franchises: Warcraft, Star Wars, Conan, Warhammer, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and The Elder Scrolls. The brand new titles are harder to push. People forget things like how much of an underdog EVE Online was at launch up against new MMORPGs with Final Fantasy and Warcraft attached. EVE survives essentially based on articles about its massive ship battles (regardless of how fun those actually are in practice) and the portion of its player base that make it a point to look down on the rest of us in our theme park MMORPGs (hey, it works, everyone thinks EVE online is this incredibly complicated beast of a game when, in practice, it's not really that difficult to play). Wildstar is still pretty new and is known essentially to other MMORPG players who are interested in that kind of title, and they're sometimes hard to pry out of their former games permanently. Not only does Carbine have to improve the game without sacrificing the niche they live in that gives them a reason to exist, but NCSoft will eventually need to hit the gas and make sure there's a lot of publicity. That's not necessarily sidebars on google ads for people who jump on WoWwiki, that means that Wildstar needs to be seen as having a reason to play above other games. Right now, they're losing the publicity battle. In all fairness, this probably isn't waiting-for-Carbine-to-fix-the-game as much as it's waiting-for-the-WoD-hype-to-die-down. NCSoft doesn't seem particularly interested in doing things on Carbine's schedule; I'm under the impression that they're waiting for something in the market before they start making Wildstar a big point of their press releases and really push the game. If they're waiting on anything, it might be drop 4, where Carbine's meant to be introducing big changes to rewards for dungeon spamming, queueing, et al. You can't have a big publicity push and get people trying empty Warplot queues again, or you have the same problem you have now. | |} ---- The attunement is not really anything you should be having to go out of your way to do though. I think if they moved the rep requirement to the end, rather than the beginning, nobody would have even noticed they were doing an attunement as they progressed on the natural course at 50. I do agree that silvers were too much back then (even though I pugged all my silvers), and it is good that they backed off of that. The only thing really working against attunement right now is the lack of queues popping. Here's hoping for Drop 4 fixes. Rewards from raiding not being rewarding were at least 75% remedied with Drop 3's crafting and rune changes. Otherwise your assessment is mostly fair. | |} ---- Sadly, Typ, almost everyone I know in Wildstar is in the Dominion RP channel. They're great folks but raiding is far from their primary interest, and to be honest, I don't want to be the one who introduces the drama and time drain of casual progression raiding to these people. :P My interest in Wildstar's gameplay design cooled after the first month, and pretty much died soon after, so I got heavily invested in housing and socializing, which led me to the RP community (even though I don't really RP). If there's word of mouth about existing casual raid guilds, I haven't heard a peep. And I don't know why casual raiders wouldn't advertise, since they need it a lot more than guilds which are 6/6 GA. :O Seems very counter-intuitive. | |} ---- As someone who currently raids 3 days a week but would love the option for 2 day/week raids, there are two major things I would like to see changed: 1. Trash density and quantity. Length of trash encounters in general. It's not a coincidence that even the hardcore progression guilds make extensive uses of stalker scientists to by pass trash. It's mindnumbingly dull and meaningless, there's too much of it, and the ratio of time spent on trash vs bosses is too high. 2. Allowing extended lockouts. Right now if you don't finish in a week, your lockout resets and you have to reclear everything all over again, which combined with the extensive trash, is time consuming no matter what. For example, our guild currently takes one raid night of 3 hours to clear 4/6. If we only raided 2 nights a week, and that's half our time spent on farm content. And as encounters get not only more difficult but also longer, a guild that raids fewer nights and hours get fewer attempts on progression bosses to learn. If guilds were given the option to save their progress and proceed with a full week of attempts on Ohmna instead, their rate of progression would be better without sacrificing encounter difficulty. Progress would still be slower, but the wall stopping them won't be due to lack of attempts. | |} ---- Attunement feels like a chore to me just because the central idea of attunement itself is not fun. While the individual components would be fun to play when I feel like it (medal dungeons, quests, world bosses), having a long list of them to tackle before I get to experience even five minutes in a raid... no. Basically what I'm arguing is that I could have actually liked the content of attunements if that content wasn't packaged into the boring attunement dynamic in the first place. When I play a new MMO, the first things I want to know are usually about endgame, because that's where longevity comes in that will justify the leveling time and sub expense (obviously I'm not a fan of leveling itself): What are the dungeons like, and how many are there? What's the raiding like and what do I have to grind to get in? How fun is the PVP and how accessible to under-geared newcomers? In Wildstar, my first question was quickly answered, and it was not a good one (they're difficult, which is good, but hard to get into with a lot of toxic players, which make the high difficulty almost a negative). The second question was necessarily blocked by the laundry list of duties I had little interest in performing without being assured I would like the endgame as a whole. The third question kind of fell to the wayside after the first two ended in disappointment, but also because at that point I had decided that housing was the best thing Wildstar offered, could give me a creative experience I'd never had before in an MMO, and would potentially contribute to the RP community I've always admired from afar in other games. Writing this now makes me wonder if it would be a good thing for players to experience raids before attunement. Like, let us fight the first boss in a raid-style environment, let us feel what the mechanics and rewards are like, before asking us to invest a bunch of time doing the fights Carbine wants done in the order Carbine wants them done. Hard to implement but it could help. | |} ---- While I'm not opposed to extending raid lockout timers, I find that making use of that feature isn't particularly helpful until you're salvaging the vast majority of the gear you would be getting from clearing the previous bosses again. What I'm saying is that your entire raid needs a certain level of gear before using that feature would provide any benefit, and would therefore be sparsely used. I believe when I raided in WoW, my guild used that feature once in 2 years. I'm game for lower trash density, but to me there's already much less trash than I'm used to seeing in other games. Maybe Datascape is different. | |} ---- I hate, hate, hate trash in raids. I've been raiding off and on, casual and semi-hardcore, for about seven years. This is my number one dislike of this gameplay design. Although, WoW has really evolved the trash issue past its ugly beginnings (which it sounds like Carbine have replicated, sadly) by making the trash a bit more challenging, a bit less dense, slower to respawn, and, most recently, making trash abilities mirror boss mechanics so that trash is effectively a training obstacle and not a hoop we need to get through before the fun fights. That is wonderful game design, IMO, and reflects deep thought and acknowledgement of player criticism, as well as recognition that although we gamers like to spend ludicrous amounts of time on video games, we prefer to do so when it's FUN. :P | |} ---- I'll say that the attunement probably shouldn't be sequenced at all. Each step should be a separate quest, whose completion adds to the checkbox of an overarching attunement quest. | |} ---- I don't know, I didn't think WoW really "fixed" the trash situation; it seems largely the same. However, I always kind of liked trash encounters, even back in the old vanilla days. I know clearing trash isn't always great for progression, but in a way it was theraputic to reliably kill things you weren't going to wipe on over and over again. I actually like fighting trash in Wildstar because nothing yet has really been a total pushover. That might be a minority opinion, though. People seem to like to skip content in dungeons to make the timer, too, which kind of depresses me. I'm the kind of guy that looked forward to the 50s in vanilla WoW so I could chain-full-clear BRD. Still, to this day, my favorite instance in any MMORPG just due to sheer epic length and scale. With changes to the zeitgeist of MMORPGs looking down on those sorts of encounters, that seems to be a permanent relic of the past. Modern BRD is sliced into four pieces to fit the timeframes of their queues. Still, I miss it. | |} ---- This would have been a very big positive change at launch. At this point it's probably too late (at least until a new expansion or some other population-increasing change). I would love having a subsection of the quest list that shows attunement quests exclusively, and if each step was presented to me as an individual quest (including each world boss and dungeon, etc). This would make the attunement much easier to comprehend and probably more fun to tackle. | |} ---- Trash is still boring compared to raid bosses, but like I said, it spawns less, it's less brainless, and most important, it teaches boss mechanics. That last one itself is a big, BIG change from old trash, which was only thematically linked to the raid instance. Funny enough, I also don't have a problem with dungeon trash. But I draw a clear line of distinction between dungeon and raid trash. Dungeon trash in the good WoW time (mostly BC heroics from my point of view) was a challenge itself, and could overwhelm you. Trash in early WoW, possibly excluding MC, always felt to me like a big repetitive slow-down. Especially when you had to reclear... my god, the complete backwards thinking that leads to trash respawns in a 20+ player raid environment... | |} ---- ---- Well, yea, in theory, but what does the attunment have to do with entering GA/DS, aside from the actual quest portions? The grindy parts of dungeon, adventure, and world boss hunting... I don't see how they build up any kind of thematic or practical link. Particularly when you add in grinding primal patterns for the one raid. Shoot me now, please. :rolleyes: | |} ---- Trash in WS only respawns in raids like once a day (practically speaking... I've never seen it actually happen during a raid), and raids are set up in wings with shortcuts like Ikea, so if you clear the boss of one wing, you won't have to kill that wing's trash again or you can skip some trash to the next boss. | |} ---- The quest text explained all that. You needed to collect MacGuffins from specific powerful residents of Nexus to repair the broken key used to unlock/decrypt the access terminal. Could it have been handled better? Absolutely. That's why so many people didn't like it or failed. The idea of the attunement wasn't the problem, it was the implementation. To me, it was all stuff I was planning on doing anyways. | |} ---- I can get behind the idea of treating trash like bosses in a raid and just not having respawns. I don't mind fighting trash even in raids (I still remember us having to deal with the damn elepatrols in MC), but it's not like I'd cry if the trash was removed. Then again, I'm also in favor of a manual reset button for raids, so that you can clear them daily if that's what you do, or you can take two weeks if that's how long it takes. The weekly lockout, that seems like the worst idea of all in a modern context, essentially both a time limit and a timesink. | |} ---- That is awesome news. | |} ---- You're right, there's a balance between gearing up the raid and forgoing loot to have more progression attempts. In a way it's kind of there in that we've been skipping more minibosses now that we no longer need the loot from them. However, there does come a time where a more casual guild will hit a time wall rather than a skill/gear wall when it comes to progression, and that's when the lockout extension will become useful. I believe in Wildstar this happens much sooner, and is the reason why you see very few 2-day raiding guilds. The sheer amount of time you sink into a raid even when it's on farm precludes any guild wanting to devote less time per week to raiding than a certain threshold. My guild raids 9 hours a week for 3 days, and I believe I have yet to see any guild raid less than 8 hours a week (2 day schedule). Meanwhile, it's pretty normal for me to see 2 day/6-hour a week raiding guilds in other games. For example, my old WoW guild raided 8 hours a week, and we did make a lot of use of the raid lockout extension. We had most of Heroic Icecrown Citadel on farm, people were almost done gearing up their offsets, and at that point, we decided to extend our lockouts more often. We didn't extend every single week for sanity reasons, but we did it often enough when we felt we had the people for it. The fight had a 1-minute unskippable RP sequence, and lasted about 11 minutes. If we didn't have the extension option, we would not have downed him at all. My friend was in a 10-man heroic guild, and they were doing 6 hours a week and still cleared their content. I'm a big believer in the benefits of a lockout extension. | |} ---- As I said in my edit... while I recognize the attunement could have been done better, in a more engaging way, to me it was all just stuff I was planning to do anyways, so it didn't bother me. I also pugged the entire quest line up to GA, so I was clearly in no hurry. | |} ---- This exact wording is how I feel about 95% of my gripes with Wildstar. And that makes me a sad panda. | |} ---- ---- Why would you grind primal patterns? by the time my guild hit DS I had enough without even thinking about it, didn't even think about it because it automatically turned them in too. Should be the same case for most players that didn't join a guild already on 6/6, even then, you get keys. | |} ---- You're not alone. I enjoy clearing what people call "trash" (i hate that word), it's a very predictible set of easy encounters and you can do fun stuff with it - like pulling 10+ mobs at once. It's indeed depressing to see that this "trash" isn't always on the gold/silver quest line, people just try to skip it and it's very frustrating. I really dislike the predatory attitude many people have towards content: it must be cleared asap and you must run from one loot pinata and ignore the rest as much as you can. Even after my 100th run of the same dungeons in Neverwinter I was always clearing the same groups on the way in the same order, at the same location. It was the shortest legit clear. Sometimes MMOs become a place in which you're just trying to achieve the perfect run and that's awesome. | |} ---- ---- I have to agree. But lets not forget that sevealr million people are currently asking their friends to play another MMORPG that just released new content. So that is a huge factor at this point in time. I too was tempted, but I realized that the other game is a cancer on gaming, and needs to die, so I'm not playing on principal ;) | |} ---- Path of least resistance is fairly normal, people flipped tables the moment someone pulled an extra pack in any WoW dungeon. That being said, STL is a good example of a dungeon where I don't feel my group skips more than 1-2 mobs total even while doing gold, KV/SC you skip some but it depends what you're doing challenge-wise, it was most likely intended that you don't have to kill everything obviously. SSM on the other hand had one of the biggest skips changed and other than the strain area everything seems about right. I don't really see skipping as an issue in dungeons anymore. | |} ---- I liked in SWTOR that your harvesting skills could allow you to take some shortcuts. | |} ---- The problem is that the only way to do SSM in the time limit required for silver is to skip all of the unnecessary trash. | |} ---- ---- ---- I set my standards higher, wildstar does not meet them and i won't promote something that fails to me my standards. | |} ---- But I thought you've somewhat recently admitted that you still play the game, "period"? So you're either not that bright for playing something that doesn't meet your standards, or you're just another wannabe self-important internet poster who (with their almost drug-like addiction) dresses up their need to "Poo-post" with phony concern trolling on the forums. Or perhaps it's a little of column A and a little of column B? | |} ---- I haven't been playing the game, i have credd through end of december, i log in periodically to check mail and open a boombox, que up to check estimated time then log out because inevitably it's "unknown" | |} ---- ---- ----